Friday, April 25, 2014

So far, the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have shown no sign
of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Assuming the Standard Model is
correct at presently available energies, we can accurately extrapolate the
theory to higher energies in order to verify its validity. Here we report the
results of new high precision calculations which show that absolute stability
of the Higgs vacuum state is now excluded. Combining these new results with the
recent observation of primordial gravitational waves by the BICEP
Collaboration, we find that the Higgs vacuum state would have quickly decayed
during cosmic inflation, leading to a catastrophic collapse of the universe
into a black hole. Thus, we are driven to the conclusion that there must be
some new physics beyond the Standard Model at energies below the instability
scale ΛI∼109 GeV, which is responsible for the stabilisation
of the Higgs vacuum.